the newsroom

The final season of The Newsroom may not be as good as the show’s First Season but it is better (taken as a whole) than the show’s inconsistent sophomore outing. Nearly the entire cast returns for a final six episodes centered around an Edward Snowden-like figure whose leaking of classified documents to News Night gets Will (Jeff Daniels) in trouble with the United States Government and forces Neal Sampat (Dev Patel) to flee the country before being charged with espionage and treason. An examination of Snowden’s actions would likely have played better than the fictionalized account that, like Season Two, has several ups and downs.

One wedding and a jail sentence. It’s an eventful week for ACN. Neal Sampat (Dev Patel) has disappeared to a non-extradition country. The team gets blasted for showing up at the White House Correspondents Dinner after previously rebuking the entire affair live on television. Will (Jeff Daniels) has been called in front of a Grand Jury to disclose the name of the source which supplied Neal with thousands of classified documents. The network is about to be sold to a man (B.J. Novak) whose idea of network news makes Charlie (Sam Waterston) want to throttle the bastard. Jim‘s (John Gallagher Jr.) relationship goes up in flames. And Sloan (Olivia Munn) and Don (Thomas Sadoski) are still attempting to hide their relationship from the Human Resources.

Election night, and The Newsroom‘s Second Season, comes to a close with a proposal, a kiss, a confession, and everyone keeping their jobs. “Election Night, Part II” wraps up most of the season’s ongoing stories by a pair of couples finally admitting their feelings for one another as Sloan (Olivia Munn) discovers Don (Thomas Sadoski) is the one who anonymously paid $1,000 to charity for her book no one wanted and Will (Jeff Daniels) surprises everyone, including himself, by proposing to MacKenzie (Emily Mortimer) with the ring he couldn’t bring himself to return.

With Jerry Dantana (Hamish Linklater) officially filing suit against ACN for his termination the next morning, and Leona Lansing (Jane Fonda) adamantly refusing to accept anyone’s resignations or cut a deal with her former employee, News Night turns its attention to covering the 2012 elections in the first-half of the Second Season finale of The Newsroom. Although the elections, and the impending lawsuit, dominate the episode there’s plenty of room for behind the scenes insanity as Charlie‘s (Sam Waterston) no-mistake tirade version of a pep-talk leads to, you guessed it, an on air mistake and two of the show’s female leads become obsessed with mostly insignificant matters far outside their control.

The story The Newsroom has been building to all season finally hits the air as the News Night crew goes public with “Operation Genoa” to tremendous ratings only to come crashing down to earth as the glaring problems in the story soon become impossible to ignore. We also learn the name of the person suing ACN isn’t someone connected with the story, someone damaged by its reporting, or the source (Stephen Root) taken out of context but Jerry Dantana (Hamish Linklater) whose case is that he alone was scapegoated (for doctoring the raw footage of their expert witness) but wasn’t alone in the faulty reporting of the story.

The highlights of “One Step Too Many” are a series of conversations and questionable choices among various members of the cast as the show also delivers the final piece of “Operation Genoa” in the taping of an interview from a retired general (Stephen Root) giving the news byte Jerry Dantana (Hamish Linklater) needs to push the news story onto the air (although he certainly helps things along by editing the raw footage to get the on-air confirmation he desperately needs in order to stop a story he has chased for seven months from dying in a rundown meeting). Although the interview, Jerry’s impassioned argument for the story, and his choice to edit the tape are the big takeaways for the season’s arc, it’s the smaller conversations between various pairs of characters that carry the episode.

Scandal, tragedy, Twitter outrage, the Righteous Daughters of Jihadi Excellence, and the Trayvon Martin shooting are equal parts of “News Night with Will McAvoy.” As the newsroom scrambles to get the audio of George Zimmerman‘s 911 call and report on the shooting the news program also reports on a bombing in Damascus, Will (Jeff Daniels) learns his father has had a heart attack, and Don (Thomas Sadoski), while dealing with his bad joke that has been picked up as a legitimate news story, tries to help Sloan (Olivia Munn) deal with naked photographs of her being leaked on Internet by a former boyfriend (Paul Greene).

Smugness is a common problem for the cast in “Unintended Consequences” which begins with Will (Jeff Daniels) shredding Neal‘s (Dev Patel) friend Shelley Wexler (Aya Cash) live on the air over the more ridiculous aspects of Occupy Wall Street (as writer/creator Aaron Sorkin continues to make no bones about how inane he believes the entire protest to be). The trouble for the rest of the staff is the fact that Shelley has what may be the only source left for Jerry (Hamish Linklater) to continue the Operation Genoa story (stretching the story’s bounds of coincidence and lucky breaks to even more absurd levels) but is far less willing to share that information after being made a fool of in front of 1.5 million viewers unless Will agrees to an on-air apology. Yeah sister, that ain’t happening.

After going on the air and calling each of the Republican nominees for President a group of “witless bullies and hapless punks” for not standing up for a gay soldier asking a question at the latest Republican primary, Will (Jeff Daniels) learns the story of his being taken off the 9/11 coverage has been leaked. At first Sloan (Olivia Munn) believes she may be the cause of the leak, but a little more investigation into just what exactly Nina Howard (Hope Davis) knows leads Will and Charlie to discover that Reese (Chris Messina) is responsible and their bullet-proof blackmail tape might as powerful as the pair originally believed.